“Keep it in the Family: School Exclusion and Academic Achievement”

Andrew McLean

QUB/QBS

PhD Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates the direct effects of school exclusion on pupils’ academic achievement as well as whether they are heterogeneous by pupils’ socio-economic status (SES). We use an identification strategy unique to the economics literature on exclusion and achievement, sibling fixed effects, and population-wide data on English secondary pupils. We find that there is a negative relationship between exclusion and achievement which survives conditioning on observable confounders and cohort, school, and sibling fixed effects. For example, in a fully adjusted model, experiencing exclusion is associated with a statistically significant 13%-point decrease in the probability of achieving at school.